Thursday, January 4. 2007

In vitro maturation (IVM) has arrived. What is IVM? It is a twist on regular IVF where instead of giving women hormone treatments to induce her to produce several mature eggs in one cycle, a women's immature eggs are harvested from her ovaries and the eggs are treated with the hormones in the lab. The eggs mature in a dish instead of in her body. The rest of the IVF process remains the same. The matured eggs are fertilized with sperm, creating embryos that are then implanted into the woman's uterus.

The "benefit" to IVM is that there is less risk for the woman since she is not taking the hormones, just her eggs are. The scientists say the IVM success rate is better than the old-fashioned way of making babies. From the Guardian:

Scientists have unveiled a new form of IVF which they claim is "better than nature" at getting some women pregnant and does not need high doses of potentially harmful hormones.

The method, which involves harvesting immature eggs and growing them outside the body, reduces the need to pump women with hormones to mature the eggs internally. It has resulted in 400 healthy babies in Denmark and won the backing of Bob Edwards, the British scientist behind the first test-tube baby.

In vitro maturation (IVM) could drastically cut the risk of side-effects for the mother and reduce the drug bill, which in the UK is mostly met by the patients.

Although the method has been discussed for years, the Danish doctors were the first to use it successfully on a large scale and track the results. A healthy 30-year-old woman who has regular periods has a 20% chance of getting pregnant through intercourse each month, but the group who received the new treatment had a success rate of 30%, they found.

The eggs are removed from the woman's ovaries before they are fully developed, then small quantities of hormones are applied in the laboratory to mature them. They are then fertilised before being implanted back in the woman's womb, as in regular IVF. The treatment avoids the need to give women hormones to help them produce extra eggs, then more to get them all matured internally.

Morally speaking IVM is no different than IVF, it is just easier on the woman and less expensive. The Catholic Church says that creating human life in a dish is contrary to the dignity of the human person.

Beside the moral implications of IVM (and the claim that it is "better than sex" at producing babies) what I find disturbing about IVM is that I am sure it will usher in fetal-mating.

Yes, you read that right, I said fetal-mating. The fact is an unborn girl has the most eggs than she will ever have in her life. A 20 week-old female fetus has 7 million immature eggs. In her book The Clone Age, Lori B. Andrews, a reproductive rights lawyer, makes the connection:

With over a million abortions a year, some scientists have begun to think the unthinkable—using female fetuses as a source of eggs for infertile women.

Why pay young women thousands of dollars to retrieve their mature eggs, when you can get many more eggs from an aborted baby girl, probably for free, and mature them in a dish? It is called fetal-mating because an aborted girl fetus could become a mother posthumously. (That sound you hear is me shuddering.)

Think that is ridiculous? Well, it isn't really when you consider this factoid from the above article:

The new technique is only beneficial for about 12% of women seeking IVF who are under 37 and have particular fertility problems which mean they produce lots of eggs but still fail to get pregnant.

What about the other 88% of couples seeking IVF who may need donated eggs? I am sure that aborted baby ovaries are looking like a gold mine right about now.

Lee M. Silver, in his book Remaking Eden, discusses fetal-mating as a theorectical way to allow a lesbian couple (Cheryl and Madeline) to have a biologically related child:

Cheryl would use IVF with donor sperm enriched or the Y chromosome to become pregnant with a male fetus. Similary, Madeline would use X-enriched sperm to become pregnant with a female fetus. Both women would undergo induced abortions near the end of their first trimester, and spermatogonia and oocytes would be recovered from the two fetuses and matured into sperm and fertilizable eggs, respectively. These would be combined through IVF to produce embryos that were frozen in liquid nitrogen until Cheryl and Madeline were ready to begin new pregnancies. [my emphasis]

With the success of IVM this scenario doesn't sound so far-fetched.

And this doesn't just impact the fertility industry, imagine the implications for cloning. Many on the left object to human cloning for the simple reason that the enormous amount of eggs that are needed puts young women at risk for exploitation. Young, cash-strapped women that donate eggs for money put themselves at risk for ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome which in extreme cases can cause infertility and even death. What happens to this objection to cloning when the source of eggs is no longer young women, but aborted fetuses?

Once we treat any human being as harvestable biological material, really anything is fair game. I like this question from Wesley J. Smith's Counsumer's Guide to the Brave New World:

How will it affect our future if human embryos and perhaps fetuses are regarded as mere natural resources to be exploited and harvested like a corn crop or prize cattle herd?

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